4 - Living in Memory: Exile and the Burden of the Future

Summary

What we share, no matter where God has placed us on this wretched earth, is the same corner we cry in when we are forced to look into ourselves. Suddenly the name brands drop off, the refugee IDs fade. When we are shoved into it, made to look at ourselves and at our past; when our future is at our back and our past is made into an angle so acute that every family has the same points leading to the same doom; when we hold onto that corner because we do not know how to build ourselves anymore, sustain our dialect, live our traditions, and be free, it is clear: we are running out of space.

Norah al-Bireh

In a 1998 essay, Palestinian scholars Salim Tamari and Rema Hamami shared their impressions of multiple visits to Jaffa, the ‘lost paradise’ of their respective families’ histories. The ‘via dolorosa’ of pilgrimage to the ancestral place is literally a source of pain, anger and frustration: Hamami's aunt, upon recognising her childhood home in Jabbaliyeh, exhibits an outburst of emotions and refuses to proceed inside; Beshara, Tamari's son, expresses his anger and frustration at the ongoing displacement of the city's remaining Palestinians;

Tamari himself, however, responds with sarcasm when he meets Shlomo, a Moroccan Jewish man who settled in the city in the wake of the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing of Jaffa's Palestinians. Although Shlomo inhabits a complex liminal position of being both a coloniser and, as a Mizrahi Jew, a subaltern, in the final analysis, for displaced Palestinians, his presence, despite his self-identification as an Arab, represents his status as a settler and theirs – as refugees. Tamari and Hamami dub their repeated pilgrimages to Jaffa ‘virtual returns’, denoting the illusory aspect of the journey: their trip only has the temporary effect of return, in both the temporal and geographical sense, yet by the end of the visit, the phantasmagoria of return dissipates and the reality of refugeehood creeps back.

Tamari, who is Jaffa-born and Hamami, a second-generation Yafawiya, navigate through memories of urban past and present-day realities of rapid gentrification and de-Arabisation. Both share a sense of ‘being burdened by Jaffa’, forced to carry it around, ‘weighed down by its past and [their] duty to that past’. The repeated ‘virtual return’ pilgrimages are reminiscent of Sisyphean attempts to reconcile fantasies about a golden past and the pain of irrevocable loss.